Three fundamental and interwoven differences separate the outlook of sites like this from the mainstream. One is the latter’s blindness to class rule, a second its blindness to the US empire, the third its belief in news media capacity to deliver reliable pictures of the world.
(Knowing or professing to know media to be untrustworthy on matters central to class-rule and empire no more gives immunity from political propaganda than knowing advertising is deeply manipulative gives immunity from commercial propaganda.)
Blindness to empire is a thing corporate media, ‘quality’ segments included, do little to counter and much to instil. We are invited to view Iraq or Libya, Syria or Ukraine, Myanmar or Palestine through lenses which systemically, with little need for conspiracy, 1 induce the tunnel-vision of amnesia. Take the media propaganda blitz on Assad. Most westerners, including leftists who should have known better, stopped thinking because they stopped remembering. Aided by what a media chorus whose unanimity they mistook for veracity did not say, they let emotion cloud reason, and viewed Syria as if Iraq and Libya had never happened.
People are like, “Yeah, always blaming the US, just because it runs a globe-spanning empire which dominates the planet with violence and coercion and works continuously to keep all the other countries subjugated to it.”
It’s like saying, “sure we’re trapped in a room with a tiger, and yes your leg is missing and you have a large bite out of your torso, but you can’t blame ALL that on the tiger. Some of it might be Steve’s fault. Steve’s kind of a jerk.”
Caitlin Johnstone
Attempting to understand Iraq or Libya, Syria or Ukraine, Myanmar, Palestine or Venezuela in isolation, without cognizance of empire, can at best furnish the most superficial conclusions. It is the business of Guardian, Economist, NYT, El Pais, Le Monde, Der Speigel et al precisely to encourage – again, we need not suppose conspiracy – such myopia to have us loathing this individual or that ‘regime’; approving this leader or that ‘democratic’ movement. Commentators I’ve featured so far – Mearsheimer, Sachs, Blumenthal, Norton – on current US thuggery in the Caribbean all know this.
None more thoroughly, and with so deep a grounding in empire’s own words, than the man featured today.
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- Two remarks on conspiracy. One, for reasons given here, here and here it is not routinely needed in news media boardrooms. That’s why I usually precede my allusions to ‘media corruption’ with the word, systemic. Two, since my belated realisation that we’ve been royally deceived on 9/11, I’ve grown more open to conspiracy as instrument of class and imperial rule. My Marxist perspective had led me to view 9/11 ‘truthism’ with disdain, yet Marxist accounts of the detailed workings of said rule are thin. We speak airily, as I spoke two posts ago in Will the US invade Venezuela – “the question is not will/won’t Trump invade … but whether or not the US ruling class will allow him to do so” – of ‘democratic’ governments as servants of ruling elites, while paying way too little attention to the role played by conspiracy: the deciphering of which requires more sophisticated models and theories of class and state than are on offer in ‘common sense’, social science or Marxist discourse. I’ll be writing at length on this in due c.
Re Note 1.
I think one could plausibly argue that almost every government in the world (and quite a few other large organisations/firms as well) is in effect a conspiracy against its people, so a few extra, add-on conspiracies would not be anything too out-of-the-ordinary.
I recommend Aaron Good’s, American Exception. I’ll be reviewing it soon Jams. It’s densely packed and, like other books I could name that are essentially adaptations of their authors’ PhD theses, no bedtime read. But absolutely worth it.